There are possibly three ways in which, in the confusion of our modern world, one can tell a hero when one sees one.
One knows a hero first by his originality. He invents a new kind and new size of man. He finishes off one sample. There he is.
The next thing one notices about this man (when he is invented) is his humility. He never seems to feel--having invented himself--how original he is. The more original people think he is, and the more they try to set him one side as an exception, the more he resents it.
And then, of course, the final way one knows a man is a hero is always by his courage, by his masterful way of driving through, when he meets a man, to his sense of ident.i.ty with him.
One always sees a hero going about quietly everywhere, treating every other man as if he were a hero too.
He gets so in the habit, from day to day (living with himself), of believing in human nature, that when he finds himself suddenly up against other people he cannot stop.
It is not that he is deceived about the other people, though it might seem so sometimes. He merely sees further into them and further for them.
Has he not invented himself? Is he not at this very moment a better kind of man than he thought he could be once? Is he not going to be a better kind to-morrow than he is now?
So, quietly, he keeps on year by year and day by day, treating other people as if they were, or were meant to be, the same kind of man that he is, until they are.
CHAPTER X
WHO IS AFRAID?
When Christ turned the other cheek, the last thing He would have wanted any one to think was that He was backing down, or that He was merely being a sweet, gentle, grieved person. He was inventing before everybody, and before His enemies, promptly and with great presence of mind, a new kind and new size of man. It was a more spirited, more original, more unconquerable and bewildering way of fighting than anybody had thought of before. To be suddenly in an enemy"s presence a new kind and new size of man--colossal, baffling--to turn into invisibility before him, into intangibility, into another kind of being before the enemy"s eyes, so that he could not possibly tell what to do, and so that none of the things that he had thought of to do would work.... This is what Christ was doing, it seems to some of us, and it is apparently the way He felt about it when He did it.
Turning the other cheek is a kind of moral jiu-jitsu.
The last thing that many of us who are interested in the modern world really want is to have war, or fighting, stop. We glory in courage, in the power of facing danger, in adventuresomeness of spirit, in every single one of the qualities that always have made, and always will make, every true man a fighter.
We contend that fighting, as at present conducted, is based on fear and lazy-mindedness; that it is lacking in the manlier qualities, that the biggest and newest kind of men are not willing to be in it, and that it does not work.
We would rather see the world abolished than to see war abolished.
We want to see war brought up to date.
The best way to fight was invented some two thousand years ago, and the innocent, conventional persons who still believe in a kind of routine, or humdrum, of shooting, who have not caught up with this two-thousand-year-old invention, are about to be irrevocably displaced in our modern life by men who have a livelier, more far-seeing, more practical, more modern kind of courage. From this time on we have made up our minds, we, the people of this world, that the only men we are going to allow to fight for us are the men who can fight the way Christ did.
Men who have not the courage to fight the way Christ did are about to be shut up by society; no one will harm them, of course, innocent, afraid persons, who have to protect themselves with gunpowder, but they will merely be set one side after this, where they will not be in a position to spoil the fighting of the men who are not afraid.
And who are the men who are not afraid?
To search your enemy"s heart, to amputate, as by a kind of spiritual surgery, the very desire for fighting in him, to untangle his own life before his eyes and suddenly make him see what it is he really wants, to have him standing there quietly, radiantly disarmed, gentle-hearted, and like a child before you; if you are able, Gentle Reader, or ever have been able, to do this, you are not afraid! Why should any one ever have supposed that it takes a backing down, giving up, teary, weak, and grieved person to do this?
Christ expressed His idea of courage very mildly when He said, in effect: "Blessed are those who dare to be meek, for they shall inherit the earth."
It takes a bolder front to step up to a man one knows is one"s enemy and cooperate with him than it does to do a little, simple, thoughtless, outside thing like stepping up to him and knocking him down.
Cooperating with a man in spite of him, moving over to where he is, winning a victory over him by getting at his most rooted, most protected, secret, instinctive feelings, literally striking him through to the heart and making a new kind of man out of him before his own eyes, by being a new kind of man to him, takes a bigger, stiller courage, is a more exposed and dangerous thing to do than to fall on him and fight him.
It is also more practical. The one cool, practical, hard-headed way to win a victory over an enemy is to do the thing that makes him the most afraid. And there is no man people are more afraid of than the man who stands up to them, quietly looks at them, and will not fight with them.
He is doing the one thing of all others to them that they would not dare to do. They wonder what such a man thinks. If he dares stand up before them and face them with nothing but thinking, what is he thinking?
What he thinks, if it makes him able to do a thing like this, must have some man-stuff in it. They prefer to wait and see what he thinks.
Courage consists in not being afraid of one"s own mind and of other people"s minds. When men become so afraid of one another"s minds and of their own minds that they cannot think, they have to back down and fight. They are cowards.
They do not know what they think.
They do not know what they want.
CHAPTER XI
THE TECHNIQUE OF COURAGE
I have never known a coward.
I have known men who did cowardly things and who were capable of cowardly thoughts, but I have never known a man who could be fairly and finally cla.s.sified as a coward.
Courage is a process.
If people are cowards it is because they are in a hurry.
They have not taken the pains to see what they think.
The man who has taken the time to think down through to what he really wants and to what he is bound to get, is always (and sometimes very suddenly and unexpectedly) a courageous man.
It is the man who is half wondering whether he really wants what he thinks he wants or not, or whether he can get it or not, who is a coward.
The coward is a half man. He is slovenly minded about himself. He gets out of the hard work of seeing through himself, of driving on through what he supposes he wants, to what he knows he wants.
So, after all, it is a long, slow, patient pull, being a courageous man.
Few men have the nerve to take the time to attend to it.
The first part of courage consists in all this hard work one has to put in on one"s soul day after day, and over and over again, doggedly, going back to it. _What is it that I really want?_
The second, or more brilliant-looking part of courage, the courageous act itself (like Roosevelt"s when he is shot), which everybody notices, is easy. The real courage is over then.
Courage consists in seeing so clearly something that one wants to get that one is more afraid of not getting it than one is of anything that can get in the way.
The first thing that society is ever able to do with the lowest type of labouring man seems to be to get him to want something. It has to think out ways of getting him waked up, of getting him to be decently selfish, and to want something for himself. He only wants a little at first; he wants something for himself to-day and he has courage for to-day. Then perhaps he wants something for himself for to-morrow, or next week, or next year, and he has courage for next week, or for next year. Then he wants something for his family, or for his wife, and he has courage for his family, or for his wife.